Biting the Hand that Pats You

Short Megan McArdle:

Holy shit, my commentors are such knee jerk conservative sycophants that even I can't take it anymore. Fucking morons with the temerity to disagree with me.

I'm not sure which is more hilarious; that Megan took this long to realize that The Big Fat Idiot is openly racist, or that her following thinks that Limbaugh would actually go after a conservative trope, let alone be sophisticated enough to do so with satire.

Update: New words, all hers:

And yes, I think that the people who are claiming that Rush is inciting a race war or a revolution are also humorless twits.

Huh-Ha! The imaginary liberal response is just as bad as the actual Limbaugh thing that happened! It's a tie!

Update II: I don't know how I missed the genius that is Megan saying "I could not possibly like Rush Limbaugh less" one second and then claiming that accusing him of "inciting a race war" is beyond the pale the next, but there you have it. Once again she is stupid on so many levels that no mere mortal can keep track of them all.

Is There a Dumbass in the House?

Megan picks the weirdest things to opine about. I'm not sure if she's trying to be edgy or if there is some secret personal reason for each of the topics she espouses on, but the only unifying thing I can find is that she's stupid on all of them.

Perhaps her recent foray into best medical practice is motivated by her multitude of chronic aliments. Whatever the cause, we can say for sure that Megan knows better.

She starts with a long excerpt of someone else's writing. The veterans will not need to be notified that it is quite a bit longer than her own musings, though no less well informed.

And so, NICE has decided, on the basis of "the evidence", that acupuncture and chiropractic are a good way to spend the NHS's money.
(...)
As Edzard Ernst points out, the Cochrane Institute (the other great temple of evidence-based medicine) actually found chiropractic to be more or less useless, while the evidence for acupuncture is that all of the ancient wisdom and theory of the meridians and qi doesn't actually confer any great benefit over and above that which can be gained from simply lying on a table and being poked with sticks.

I see. So one investigative body says that chiropractors and acupuncture work, and another does not. Naturally, since those two things aren't "modern medicine" this is proof that the skeptics are right. Also, the fact that both report that acupuncture works is central to his point. The real problem here is the acupuncture works even if you're doing it differently than is commonly done, proving that acupuncture doesn't work and is total bullshit.

The rest of the excerpt extols on how medicine is complex and so we can't know anything for sure. This is both insightful and proof that we know for sure that acupuncture and chiropractors are crocks.

Now we get to Megan.

This is part of a broader problem with medicine and other sciences with physics envy. Medicine, like economics, is really messy. You can't do the same kind of controlled experiments that you can do on rats or quarks, and as a result, the results are often hard to interpret.

Hmm, you can't do experiments in medicine? Wow, those MD-PhD's are gonna be pissed to find out they wasted a decade of their life pursuing the impossible. I Love the analogy to economics, too. We all know that studying individual ailments and studying the complex interactions of millions of people are roughly equivalent. That's why medicine and economics have both come out with so few concrete improvements for our day to day lives.

But this doesn't stop doctors, or policymakers, from acting as if the studies or metastudies can deliver vastly more certainty than is possible from such inherently sloppy science.

Which is why our muse calls herself an economist.

This is why, for example, I am broadly sympathetic to Paul Campos' claim that medical guidelines on obesity tell you much more about the attitudes towards fat in the upper middle class social stratum that doctors occupy, than about reliable scientific evidence on same.

Right, the fact that medicine cannot produce reliable evidence is proved by the fact that medical claims aren't backed by the available evidence. The available evidence which cannot be produced.

But policy demands certainty. And so you get obesity guidelines advising everyone to diet and excercise to shed their excess pounds, even though it's as close to a scientific certainty as anything is that most people simply regain any weight they manage to diet off. And you get absurdly precise economic forecasting, even though in many cases, the better answer would be "who knows?"

It's not that Megan is wrong all the time. It's that no one can ever possibly be right about anything. Oh, and the fact that fat people have a hard time losing weight is apparently proof that being overweight is not detrimental to your health. Also, since most people don't lose weight no one should try, ever. Or something. She has a point. She swears.

In both cases, I don't see a better alternative. But we should be more skeptical of both the institutions, and their claims.

Oh, that explains her constant cheer-leading for the implementation of the things she just attempted to disprove.

On Outrage and Annoyance: Twisting a Thought Pretzel

There's been a number of them lately; the ones that just scream at you from their titles alone. Here we have "Fair Pay" which is, amazingly, properly capitalized. Way to go, hardworker! I know that shift key has been giving her trouble since she became dimly aware of the English language. It's good to see she's making progress.

Speaking of hard work:

One of the dividing lines between me and a lot of the commentators on the Wall Street crisis is that I am not outraged by their pay. If any of my classmates are left on the Street, I'm well aware that they mortgaged their last ten years in order to bet on a directorship that's now at best a badly tainted prize, and at worst just evaporated beneath their fingers. I work 60 to 80 hour weeks doing something I love. They've been working 30-50 hours a week more than that, doing work that no reasonable human being could claim to enjoy the mechanics of. I do not resent the difference between their well-located New York co-ops and my tiny row house in an "emerging" neighborhood in DC. I'm only thankful I'm the one in the row house.

The avalanche of stupidity comes quickly these days. Seems like every post I take a look at has an opening paragraph so choc full o' crap I can smell it through the screen. Rundown time:

1) She's not outraged that people are taking millions of tax payer money because they completely fucked up after having already collected millions while in the process of fucking up? Yet she complains about the horrors of welfare and food stamps as if we should allow people to starve to death so that they don't get soft. Huh, interesting point of view.

2)Hm, herself and her classmates mortgaged "ten years" (that's a long time to get a fucking MBA) to get to the point of wreaking havoc on our economy. Yeah, that's swell. I personally have lots of respect for those who think of education as "mortgaging" their time. I know that when I finish my PhD, if I'm not making 100k right off the block I'm going to rue all of that damn time I spent "educating" myself. Seriously, who the fuck demands sympathy for choosing a job they're essentially admitting is complete bullshit? These people "mortgaged" their time because they wanted to be, and felt entitled to be, masters of the fucking universe. I suppose we should laud Stalin the many hours he put in trying to kill all these people. I mean, c'mon guys, look how fucking hard he worked?

3) She works 60-80 hours a week? Put that one in the "claims unsubstantiated by evidence" file.

4) Again, not sure why we're supposed to feel so bad about people who work really hard doing something of use to no one just because they work hard.

So she quotes someone who makes a point that these people are pretty much brainwashed. It's a fair point. I'm not sure why Megan brings it up, though, because her next libergraph introduces itself with:

The difference between me and them is that I don't think they deserve their pay, either. Now it may be that I, in my position as taxpayer, have to continue to pay these guys their huge salaries, because the unintended consequences of trying to regulate their pay will make it harder to get the banking system back on its feet.

Oh, so people are getting undeservedly rich while billions starve, but that's not outrageous. Again, point taken, McArdle. Glad that she's willing to take one for the team by paying them with her taxes. We wouldn't want to destroy the fabulous banking system. I mean, it's been keeping us out of depressions for decades at a time at only the cost of a few S&L type scandals in between. That's only a major scandal/screw up every 10-20 years! It's a fucking peachy keen organization that one is, the banking system. Gotta pay to keep it healthy! Fuck getting people to the doctors. I want my tax money going to the banking system!

I don't know how much more of this I can actually address directly. She futilely tries to pump her argument but somehow manages to start talking about herself again. Guess who's not at all outraged by their inability to get a job in 2002 after getting their MBA. Not Megan, that's who. After picking out the narcissism, her argument is almost a thing of beauty. She's essentially saying that the rules are totally arbitrary and no one is entitled to anything. Yet, this is the system for which all attempts at correction are misguided government coercion. Unless of course it's the banking system which needs a bailout in which case open up Treasury's coffers, already! Can't you see the investment bankers are behind on their boat payments? I love libertarians. "Life sucks but I got mine. Whatcha gonna do? PS The other people who got theirs are gods!"

Towards the end, she clarifies a point on her outrage (Only 20 million paragraphs into another one of her "Me me me" screeds).

So for all the bankers annoy me, their pay--and its difference from mine--doesn't outrage me. The difference between their pay and that of a physical therapy assistant or an auto line worker doesn't outrage me.

Ohhhhh. It's just annoying. Yeah, I see. The exploitation of the productive members of society by the members who merely push paper around is a mere annoyance. Silly me. Once I realize that the people whose time was spent in the pursuit of money at the expense of life, relationships, and any sense of having made a meaningful contribution have made sacrifices for their money, suddenly I don't see them in such a low light. If they love money so much they're willing to sacrifice their fucking soul for it, well, hey, I guess they deserve it, right? Oh wait, then she says "No one deserves their pay so I can hardly be angry at blah blah taking what they can get." so they don't deserve it. And if we're angry it's not because there's a shitfest of a system that needs to be fixed. We're just jealous. Or something, I dunno. The mobious strip that is this woman's thoughts is far too twisted in on itself for me to follow.

She closes with some bullshit about how she's not angry at anyone, which is completely congruent with her constant backing of those with whom she identifies while she tears down those with whom she does not. The reason she didn't frame her whole spiel from the POV of the autoworkers? Coincidence, I'm sure.